OLPC’s Negroponte offers to help India realize $35 tablet

One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte says he wants to share his …

In an open letter to the government of India, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project founder Nicholas Negroponte expressed enthusiasm for the country's recently announced $35 tablet effort and offered to assist by making his organization's technology and expertise available.

The offer of collaboration is the latest odd twist in OLPC's erratic relationship with India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). The real significance of Negroponte's offer, however, is that it reflects OLPC's evolving views about the value of collaboration.

OLPC designs low-cost education computing devices for developing countries. The project aimed to produce a ubiquitous $100 laptop that would bring constructivist learning theory to the developing world. The project has fallen far short of fulfilling its initial goals due to serious setbacks, ranging from technical and logistical failures to divisive ideologicalconflicts. OLPC was forced to reorganize and downsize much of its development staff last year as its funds dwindled. Despite these cuts, the organization was able to continue moving forward by narrowing its focus and pursuing a less ambitious strategy.

When the OLPC project first launched, Negroponte argued that OLPC's agenda could only be achieved by harnessing economies of scale. The laptops would be sold to governments in massive quantities in order to reduce overall manufacturing costs. Negroponte contended that competing efforts and alternative low-cost laptop products were harmful to OLPC's vision because they would fragment the market and undermine OLPC's ability to achieve the level of scale that he believed was necessary for success.

This became a contentious issue that isolated OLPC from potential partners—particularly Intel, which parted ways with OLPC and built its own competing Classmate PC. Intel frowned on OLPC's one-size-fits-all approach and argued that diverse offerings were needed in order to encourage adoption of low-cost educational computing.

In the long run, Intel's approach proved to be more viable. Classmate PCs have shipped in far greater numbers than OLPC's laptops, and few governments were willing to make the high-volume orders that Negroponte hoped to sign.

Negroponte's views on competition appeared to have softened substantially when he announced OLPC's XO-3 tablet project earlier this year. OLPC is working with chip-maker Marvell to build a low-cost touchscreen device. Instead of insisting on an exclusive partnership, Negroponte is open to collaborating with a broader ecosystem of hardware vendors who will build their own competing tablet products with the same underlying reference hardware. Negroponte's open invitation to India's MHRD reflects OLPC's departure from its prior obsession with scale and exclusivity.

India and OLPC

OLPC has had a rocky relationship with India's MHRD. After briefly evaluating OLPC's first XO laptop, the MHRD completely rejected the idea of using laptops for education—describing it as pedagogically unsound and potentially detrimental to student health. Despite this harsh rejection, the country later announced its own independent project to produce an unprecedented $10 laptop.

The MHRD's $10 laptop effort launched with much media fanfare but never really materialized. The estimated price per unit was later adjusted to $100, but the project eventually vanished. Last year, India dropped the pretense of having its own laptop project and bought 250,000 OLPC laptops.

India's new $35 tablet announcement is likely to prove just as ephemeral as the $10 laptop. Critics say that it's yet another in a long line of empty politically motivated promises from the MHRD. Viewed in the context of India's nationalistic desire to have its own internal low-cost computing technology, Negroponte's request for collaboration takes on a new dimension.

"The world needs your device and leadership. Your tablet is not an 'answer' or 'competitor' to OLPC's XO laptop. It is a member of a family dedicated to creating peace and prosperity through the transformation of education," Negroponte said in his letter. "[I offer] full access to all of our technology, cost free. I urge you to send a team to MIT and OLPC at your earliest convenience so we can share our results with you."

Negroponte is offering to assist the MHRD, but it's obvious that he has carefully phrased his offer in a way which implies that India has something of value to contribute back to OLPC and the broader education computing community. This is politically savvy because it gives the MHRD a way to buy OLPC's upcoming XO-3 and still save face.

If the $35 tablet project someday disappears, the Indian government can simply buy OLPC's product and frame it as a project developed in collaboration with the OLPC.